Humour
Did you know that “aim of blur” is an anagram of “Fourmilab”?
Well, now you can find all kinds of cool anagrams yourself, on
your own computer, without even connecting to the Internet.
Fourmilab's Anagram Finder is a
command-line program which finds all the anagrams of a given
phrase made up of words from a list of 117972 words legal in
the popular crossword game. You can build your own
dictionaries from custom word lists and search for anagrams
using them. The program is written in C++ and may be built on
any system with a modern, compatible, compiler such as GCC. A
ready-to-run Win32 executable and complete source code are
available. Written in the
literate
programming style, the hyperlinked source code may be read
on line.
New version 1.3 fixes compile problems with GCC versions 3.3
and 3.4, library incompatibilities on Solaris 5.9, and now includes a
native 32-bit Windows executable built with Microsoft Visual Studio
.NET.
I seem to have a kind of animal magnetism: I attract unusual animals
(flies too, but I'm so not going there). Over the years I've managed
to capture some of the curious critters which crossed my path on film
and silicon, and here are some of their photos. These are all accidental
encounters with wildlife around the house, office, and garden.
Please don't use the creepy giant spider photo to scare
small children!
Manned orbiting battle stations, armed with rapid-fire machine guns!
Bad science fiction? Well, actually, space age history, just
recently revealed. Read all about it, and explore guns in
space: yesterday, today, and tomorrow.
The Bullets Screen Saver
extends the life of your monitor by riddling it with indiscriminate
gunfire, complete with (optional) sound effects. Both a
ready-to-install screen saver for 32-bit Windows systems and source code are
available.
New version 2.0 is compatible with dual screen
configurations on Windows XP and saves preferences in the registry
individually for each user.
The final song in the 1999 movie
South Park: Bigger, Longer & Uncut
may hold the record for the greatest number of consecutive adjectives
in a movie soundtrack song. In any case, most fans agree it is both
catchy and quite funny, even though they rarely agree on precisely
what the words are! There are numerous purported transcriptions of
these lyrics on the Web, almost all differing in the details. Pulling
the exact words out of a noisy mix is never easy, and the more ears
devoted to the task the better. This document presents this puzzle
with the passage in question chopped up into word-size sound snippets
which you can either play online or download in either MP3 or WAV
format for forensic examination on your own computer. Readers are
invited to submit their suggestions and votes for already suggested
alternatives, which will be tabulated in regular updates to the
document.
Three great twentieth-century physicists: Albert Einstein,
Werner Heisenberg, and Frank Tipler stand before the Throne of God
on Judgement Day. Original science fiction story.
Impress your friends! Persuade the undecided! Meet new and
interesting people! Get your car shot up by right-wing
yahoos! Be smeared on the front page of The Wall Street
Journal! Yes, it's the one, the only, the original
“Evil Empires: One down, one to go…” bumper sticker, in both
PostScript and PNG image formats in a variety of resolutions.
Don't you just hate it when you're about to close a
clandestine munitions deal and your partner raises a
question about the relative applicability of Rules of
Acquisition 35 and 177? You'd look like a lobeless altruist
if you had to stop and ask whether Rule 35 is “Peace is good for
business” or “War is good for business”! Install this Memo
Pad document containing a compendium of the Rules of
Acquisition on your Palm OS® handheld and
profit from the distilled wisdom of generations of Ferengi
in the palm of your hand. Since this reference is provided
as a Memo Pad archive, you can read it using the built in
PalmOS Memo Pad application; there's no need to install a
document reader application, and you can modify the document
using the Memo Pad editing functions.
Nerds weren't held in the highest esteem in the tempestuous times
of the late sixties, but if you had access to a mainframe
computer with a fast line printer, a great way to make new
friends and meet radical chicks was
cranking out banners for the cause du jour on the
graveyard shift when the Man wasn't looking. The FIST
program traces its lineage directly back to a program I punched
onto Hollerith cards
for a UNIVAC 1108
in September 1969. It prints banners with a clenched
fist and block-letter slogan of your choice. Various
silly options let you choose a right- or left-handed fist
according to your political persuasion and to adjust the
size of the fist commensurate with the vehemence of your convictions
and your printer's paper size. In the spirit of Donald E.
Knuth's most excellent mise à jour of the
Adventure
game, this version is presented as a
literate program
in the
CWEB
language; C source code is included.
Just because you're a subatomic particle doesn't
mean you can break the law!
A very short parody of the style of computer user manual writing which
reminds me of beating a moose to death with an aluminium baseball bat.
Robert Heinlein's 1950 movie collaboration with George Pal,
Destination Moon, is rightly considered
one of the classics of film science fiction, winning an Oscar
for Best Special Effects. On the other hand, his 1953 effort with Richard
Talmadge, Project Moonbase, is largely
forgotten, and deservedly so. One of the key moments in the film is
the crew's guiding a supply ship in for a landing at the
newly-established Moon base, and the cinematic realisation of this
was, shall we say, at no risk of an Oscar nomination.
Landing by Hand on the Moon
presents a video clip of
this less-than-magic moment in movie special effects and an
explanation (hidden until you click to display it) of what you're
seeing in the clip.
No sooner do you get rid of one Evil
Empire than another begins to sprout--in Brussels! If
you're lucky enough to be outside (or even encircled by) the
European Union, thank your lucky stars and display this symbol
to ward off those twelve most unlucky stars from climbing your
flagpole. If you're inside, say “enough is enough” with this
No EU! symbol, available as image files in assorted
resolutions, scalable PostScript, or emblazoned upon a
bewildering variety of merchandise.
A fable which poses the question, “If a well-managed
commercial software project attempts to maximise total
return over the product life-cycle, what then should
a free software project seek to optimise?“
It never snows in San Francisco. Well,
almost never. After moving to Marin County,
north of San Francisco in the mid-1970's, imagine
my surprise to wake up one fine February morning
and find 10 cm of snow on the ground. A photo
dating from twenty-plus years ago and a little
embellishment with a modern day paint program
results in a curious poster.
What can you learn, in three years of computer time, about
an obscure problem in recreational mathematics? Not very
much, at least in this case. But hey, negative results
are still results, right? And still the Quest beckons to
your idle loop. In 1995, Tim
Irvin continued the Quest to two million digits.
His story
illustrates both how fast computers have gotten in the the last five years,
and how much of that power is often devoted to the idle loop.
A collection of genuine, breathtakingly clueless E-mail sent by
visitors to this site.
Yo! Windows application developers…it could be worse—you could
be damned to Hell forever! But would that really be worse?
End of the world: don't you just hate it when that happens?
Here's a risk you may not yet have pondered.